Side Two
Anteater: And that consistency carries into the second side fairly well with the punchy 'Afraid Of Love'.
Unknown Soldier: …which is also followed by ‘Lovers in the Night’ I associate them together as they are the two most rock orientated tracks/harder edged tracks on the album and also the former almost leads into the second.
Anteater: Yeah, there’s a nice bridge moment between them.
Anteater: I think it was a good idea to open the second side with a pair like that…
Anteater: …since it sends the overall pacing of the album way back up to where it was at the start.
Unknown Soldier: Also at last Steve Lukather sings a rock track properly, on "Afraid of Love" not like on "Live For Today" a drivel of a track from the previous album.
Unknown Soldier: Part of the strength of
Toto IV is its song placement, I think a lot of time was spent on its song order.
Anteater: Yeah, this is the first album where we hear Lukather actually melding more on the upper tempo stuff as a singer. He's come a long way since the beginning.
Anteater: I guess that applies to everyone here though.
Anteater: They only held this lineup together for
IV before all hell broke loose, but this was the classic lineup at its best in some respects.
Unknown Soldier: I love the piano intro of David Paich into "Lovers in the Night"
Unknown Soldier: ...... and it's surprising that this is the first David Paich vocal on the album.
Anteater: Yeah, Paich has been scaling back his vocal role in the band since 'Hydra'.
Unknown Soldier: Do you know that when I first got this album, those two tracks were my most played which of course shows that I was always a bigger fan of their more rock centric stuff.
Anteater: That applies to me as well: Toto really shine on their uptempo material
Unknown Soldier: "Lovers in the Night" of course has that classic Toto sound halfway through, before Steve Lukather kicks in with his guitar and I'm sure you know the bit.
Anteater: His tone is absolutely snarling. It's not heavy metal or anything, but he's always just ahead of Paich's rolling keys.
Anteater: The second half of this song has a flavor to it that reminds me a lot of the first album
Unknown Soldier: That now leads us into another strong Kimball track "We Made It"
Unknown Soldier: I kind of put "We Made It" in with "Make Believe" and "Good For You" all similar tracks that were destined to be strong album material.
Anteater: Do you think it’s a good or bad thing that
IV is so tonally consistent?
Anteater: People never hold that against the classic heavy metal records or other types of genres, but a lot of folks seem to treat that as a strike against a lot of the "radio rock" albums
Unknown Soldier: In hindsight for a true Toto fan bad as there is little variety, but it was the album that the band needed to put out, so it was a perfect from this aspect.
Unknown Soldier: I know when I finally got the previous three albums, Toto
IV became the least played.
Anteater: Variety is the spice of life, but its a hard thing to balance
Anteater: Toto thankfully have quite a bit of that over the course of their whole discography, but every album had a different balance.
Anteater: In any case, I do like 'We Made It'. It leads into my favorite song on the album actually, 'Waiting For Your Love'.
Anteater: Pretty much Kimball's 'Georgy Porgy', and he does so well that I think they should have used him more often on that slower stuff.
Unknown Soldier: Now I don't really dig that song, maybe because it's the "Georgy Porgy" of this album. Also the video for it if I remeber was shot in a club environment, not the sort of place a rock band should be doing a video.
Anteater: Hah, I remember seeing that video a long time ago. They didn't really look out of place at a club though, TBH
Anteater: Hell, even Yes used to play in clubs like that one.
Unknown Soldier: maybe it was the thing back then.
Unknown Soldier: So the album finished with its second monster single "Africa" which was even bigger than "Rosanna" here.
Anteater: Great groove, but the chorus on that one always annoys me!
Anteater: But I'm not surprised at all that it ended up being the band's biggest hit of all time
Anteater: Fun fact: the album had been out nearly an entire year before 'Africa' was released as a single. So the fact it went to #1 so fast just goes to show you how much people must have latched on to it.
Unknown Soldier: Well that's the key behind these monster selling rock albums, in that the third of fourth single can still be a massive seller almost a year after the release of the album, it's almost like the label hold something special back.
Anteater: That's a neato trick: it doesn't seem to work in today's mainstream musical world though.
Unknown Soldier: It happened with the Cars on their Heartbeat City album with "Drive" which was released further down the pecking order.
Anteater: <3 that album
Unknown Soldier: Things have changed so much since then of course.
Unknown Soldier: Me too one of my all time favs
Anteater: The best thing about 'Africa' is that looping keyboard refrain.
Anteater: It was pretty unique for the time.
Anteater: I just wish some other song had become the huge multi-million dollar seller, because the lyrics are completely nonsensical.
Anteater: And as a result the group was unable to move away from the mainstream's perception of them as some cheesebox soft rock ensemble.
Unknown Soldier: Yes that looping keyboard is special as is the chorus and the video again was perfectly done.
Unknown Soldier: I think the song reached no.2 on the UK singles chart and Toto
IV I know reached no.4 on the album chart here. Not bad for an AOR band that wasn't exactly liked here.
Anteater: That's pretty impressive actually. This was definitely the "soft rock" era.
Anteater: Remember that Christopher Cross had won a bunch of Grammys back in 1980 for his first album too
Anteater: I remember reading some people's reviews of
IV saying "how could THIS album had won a bunch of critical awards over *insert obscure post-punk album*" and such…
Anteater: Like it was completely unprecedented.
Anteater: But
IV was in vogue, and thus it did well. I'm actually happy it did so well too. If it hadn't, Toto would have broken up completely.
Unknown Soldier: Well albums like Hotel California and Breakfast in America were still in people's minds and the people that made those multi-million sellers would've led the way buying Toto
IV.
Anteater: You were actually alive back then, unlike myself :P
Unknown Soldier: yes hahaha but didn't listen to stuff like Supertramp and the Eagles until the late 80s though.
Anteater: People didn't really start digging into cassettes until the mid 80's right?
Anteater: CDs didn't even come into minority use until the early 90's
Anteater: I'm guessing most people heard
IV on vinyl
Unknown Soldier: Exactly. 80% of people here bought vinyl and far fewer cassettes. Cassettes were more popular there, as there is a greater culture there of listening to rock music whilst driving, as you drive much longer differences there than we do here.
Unknown Soldier: Most people then replaced a lot of the vinyl with Cd's in the 90s.
Anteater: Thought as much.
Anteater: Taking that into consideration, I consider
IV to be Toto's second most successful attempt at a full-fledged album up until the mid 80's.
Anteater: It flows well from song to song and has a decent level of variety without any abrupt tonal shifts.
Anteater: I don't like it as much as their first album, and nothing on it quite measures up to Hydra's title track or something like 'English Eyes' off of
Turn Back:, but
IV has a pacing that appeals to the driver in me.
Unknown Soldier: It's a safe album and the perfect starter album for anybody listening to Toto. It's more consistent than the previous two albums but of course doesn't have the mystique of Hydra or the grit of
Turn Back: and of course it doesn't have the intricate feel of the debut. Toto
IV has been polished until it shines and that was what AOR was meant to be for many people anyway.
Anteater: It's definitely one of the best places to start.
Anteater: It's not in my top five albums for Toto, but it's in the top ten.
Anteater: 'It's A Feeling', the monster ballad 'I Won't Hold You Back', and everything on side B bar 'Africa' are my favorite moments on
IV
Unknown Soldier: I'd agree with that too and "I Won't Hold You Back" is my favourite track but I really like "Africa" as well, it's just so smooth sounding.
Unknown Soldier: Next of course Toto try something very very different, but when a band are at the top of their game commercially they usually have the freedom to do this type of thing anyway.